Doug Adams has more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience within the high technology and consumer packaged goods industries. Before becoming CEO and President of NTT Global Data Centers (NTT GDC), Adams was part of the executive leadership team that started RagingWire, a pioneer in colocation services that grew to work as the Global Data Centers Americas division (of which he served as CEO).
Prior to his roles at NTT DATA, Adams served as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for NEC Technologies, Inc. with executive responsibility for NEC’s magnetic and optical data storage products. He previously held various sales and marketing management positions within Mars, Kal Kan Foods, Inc., Dove Ice Cream, and Uncle Ben’s Rice.
Adams earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration Marketing from the University of Southern California.
With over two decades of industry experience, beginning with a single data center operation in Sacramento to leading the world’s third-largest data center company, could you share insights into your professional journey and the transformations you have observed in the data center industry?
It’s been an amazing journey, and I’ve been at this for over 25 years now. I started by helping RagingWire, which was a tiny company on the West Coast of the United States, and we grew that platform until we were bought by NTT. I worked with NTT for 12 years running the the US data center business, and a year and a half ago, they asked me to take over as global head of NTT GDC.
When I look at my career, especially my years with NTT, I would say the fondest part of my journey is the path I’ve taken. I enjoyed the very early startup days when we were working 20 hours a day and literally starting the company. We had no logo, no website, nothing—but I had a couple of really good entrepreneur partners who were the true founders—George Macricostas and Yatish Mishra. I was brought in about six months into the process, and they did such a good job getting us to where we needed to be. Once we got to scale, that’s where my skills really kicked in. I’d always worked for large multi-billion-dollar companies, so I spent those next few years bringing in what I feel is the most talented team in the industry. The most important piece to me is my team—they’re amazing.
Since I assumed the global role, we’ve moved from four disparate, autonomous entities to one true global entity: one P&L, one set of function heads, one global management team. While we have regional managing directors who are responsible for bookings, customer relationships, and stewarding employees within their geographies, all 4,000 employees report directly to the ten functional direct reports I have. That’s given us a much better process and much better governance, so it’s been incredibly exciting, and clearly it’s working: We’ve seen 20 percent year-over-year growth.
I honestly don’t see myself doing anything different ever. I love this industry, and the change has been sweeping and dramatic. Even within my tenure, for example, we’ve gone from struggling to sell a rack to selling entire buildings and campuses. It’s just incredible. We’re also now booking 100MW opportunities from the start—not beginning with 5MW and growing capacity over decades. Where we used to build a 12MW building, we’re now building our largest campus and have a couple campuses with 350MW of IT load. It’s pretty impressive.
NTT GDC operates under the umbrella of the global conglomerate NTT, specifically within NTT DATA. Could you elucidate the relationship between NTT, NTT DATA, and NTT Global Data Centers for our readers?
NTT Holdings is the 94 billion USD and 350,000+ person holding entity through which all of the NTT businesses report. NTT DATA is the 30 billion and 156,000+ person company within NTT Holdings that is divided into Japan and the rest of the globe. What I manage, NTT Global Data Centers, falls within the global arm of NTT DATA. We are part of a credit-rated, 94 billion USD business. Together with our sibling companies, we provide a wide range of advanced, secure managed services, including those related to AI. In other words, we focus on the data centers and interconnection, but our sibling companies within NTT DATA provide all sorts of different IT services.
By integrating assets from various entities worldwide—such as RagingWire (US), e-shelter (Germany), Gyron (UK), Netmagic (India), and other NTT Southeast Asia assets, NTT GDC has established a singular global entity. What advantages does this integration offer to your clients?
By integrating these disparate entities, we are able to achieve true global scale and scale our business more easily. We’re able to buy as one entity. We do contracting as one entity. We have 4,000 employees within minimal duplication. Through a team of ten management heads spread across the globe (two in Asia, three in Europe, and five in the US), we’re able to tap into diverse thought processes and diverse experiences rather than having everyone lead from the US.
Beyond scaling, this approach has supported standardization. Although our product may not look exactly the same across the globe, our documents used to govern the building and the supply chain we use to build it are standardized.
Our combination of scalability and standardization allows us to be able to provide an inexpensive, high-quality product globally while providing reliable customer experiences and standardized buildings. It’s not perfect everywhere, and it’s not exactly the same everywhere, but it offers a more resilient, less expensive, and more standardized product by taking advantage of the kinds of scale we see from combining the assets, resources, and employees of these companies. Customers aren’t the only ones who benefit, either: Employees have a better career path and work life experience, and shareholders have a better return.
How does NTT GDC ensure its corporate culture and values are maintained and adapted across its diverse global operations and workforce?
This question is a tough but important one, and it’s one we’ve spent a lot of time talking about. As a start, we have an internal communications team that focuses on ensuring the global team management and integration message is communicated to all employees in a regular cadence. I also commit to doing a quarterly trip around the globe where I pick a location in every region we operate in and do a town hall meeting, which is broadcast across that region. I’ll also then meet with all the employees in that office. For example, in the span of a few weeks, I will have held town halls in India, Singapore, Japan, and the UK. The point is alignment: We want to ensure employees, messaging, and strategy are all aligned. So, we want to spend the time meeting with our employees regularly to ensure they understand our vision, our values, and our purpose. The most important piece of the puzzle is making sure each employee knows where and how they fit into our overall strategy.
We’re not perfect, but I’m very proud of the work we’ve done in this area because it was one of my main concerns going into this integration—how could we integrate culture as much as our business practices? One of our biggest strategies is around growing our people and ensuring we have a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce who understand where they fit in the company, what their purpose is, what they add to the company, and why we value them. So, we spend a lot of time cultivating and supporting our people.
The industry is witnessing exceptional growth driven by significant data generation and consumption on both consumer and business fronts. How is NTT GDC strategically positioned to accommodate and capitalize on this expansion?
Fortunately, we had a fairly significant amount of land banked coming into this massive AI rush. We also were fortunate to have the right mix of customers, because the existing customers that we had within our portfolio are the ones that happen to be growing the fastest and the ones that are implementing liquid-to-the-chip the fastest. So, one of the things that I’m proud of is that we have—within production, or just being released into production—250MW of liquid-to-the-chip. I don’t think there’s another provider in the world that can make and back up that claim. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to other providers, and they have 10MW, 20MW, or 100MW of capacity that’s all legacy mainframes—nothing designed for liquid-to-the-chip for the new GPUs, which respond radically different under liquid vs. air cooling. Since our customer base is primarily early adopters of this cooling technology, we’ve spent a lot of time working with them on tweaking, tuning, and perfecting this type of liquid cooling, and I think others are, frankly, behind us in this technology. I’m not saying it’s a permanent differentiator, or that they can’t catch up, but in the short run, I think it’s an important, interesting differentiator because of the client mix we have. We’ve had liquid-to-the-chip in production for a couple of years, whereas most people are just now starting to get their data centers ready for it.
Given the current industry challenges of land and power scarcity, what strategies is NTT GDC implementing to ensure growth while utilizing sustainable and reliable energy solutions?
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve grown 20 percent year-over-year, and we continue in that growth pattern. Simultaneously, sustainability is at the core of NTT DATA; it’s ingrained in our company values. We’re very fortunate to have a giant parent company who is completely committed to being carbon neutral by 2030 (we’re currently already 51 percent of the way there). With their support, we also created a 3.6 billion USD green bond and made the commitment to donate over a million people hours to sustainability. No one else in industry has done that, and we have a very deep commitment to maintain the highest standards.
Can you discuss any recent technological advancements or innovations within NTT GDC that are helping to improve efficiency, security, or customer satisfaction in your data centers?
I think the concept I described earlier of liquid-to-the-chip is probably the biggest advancement. It increases operational efficiency by around five percent, which may seem minimal, but when you think about a 36MW building, that’s 1.5MW. So, 100MW of energy came off the globe because we use this approach. At the scale on which we’re operating, these advancements are significant.
Likewise, I think the fact that we’ve integrated multiple companies means we’re forced to be more efficient in order to provide a better product at a lower cost. Our changes in company organization combined with our position as a truly global company means we’re far ahead in terms of streamlining and innovation. Speaking of those two concepts, we’re also working on using AI for predictive maintenance and exploring how AI can be used in other facets of the business to improve efficiency further.
Considering the rise of artificial intelligence, what projections do you have for the future of your business and the industry over the next decade?
AI is creating a tailwind in the days of business like I’ve never seen in my 25 years of working in this field. It’s even dwarfing what happened with the cloud movement. I remember the early days of that: We spent all our time talking about buy versus build and why people should be focusing on core, not contact, activities. Then the cloud discussion happened, which really propelled the business. We rode that wave. Now we’re riding the AI wave, which took our projected CAGR from 13.5 to 23 percent overnight. During the cloud wave, we sold ten racks, and it became a megawatt. Then it became 8MW. We got excited.
Now I don’t get overly excited unless we sell a 36MW building. The scale at which we’re operating today is so much different than the scale at which we operated ten years ago. Unless you’re a large, global provider operating at scale, it’s very difficult to meet the demands of AI customers. We’re observing a bifurcation in the market. The large at-scale companies are winning business and delivering on time and on budget. The newer, smaller entrants are having a difficult time because they don’t have the strategic three-year frameworks locked into their sourcing. They’re not used to producing at scale, and I think we’re starting to see projects get delayed or customers canceling agreements. That’s because we’re starting to see providers not able to provide. They’re not performing, or they’re not delivering like they said they would. Scale is not easy. It’s not easy to build, it’s not easy to operate, and it’s not easy to source. That’s when business gets difficult, and that’s what AI is doing—it’s driving that need for scale.
Which geographic markets or regions represent the most substantial growth prospects for NTT GDC?
The US, our most mature market, is continuing to be the gift that keeps on giving. We’re selling everything we can as fast as we can build it there. Europe is facing a supply shortage, which is constraining demand, but otherwise the demand would be very high there, too. India likewise continues to drive very high demand.
In some markets, the pricing is getting a little unnatural. New entrants coming in are desperately competing for business, and they’re dropping price to a level that I view as unhealthy. That’s a short-run issue, but it’s not a long-run issue. Asia as a whole still remains pretty strong, and it has eclipsed Europe in the demand we’re seeing from our markets.
Do you have any closing remarks for the industry?
I can’t say it enough: This is the best industry you can be in. I love everything about it. We’ve got a group of incredibly talented people. I’d also say we’re in probably the second inning of this business. The first was cloud, and I think we have a couple innings still ahead of us. The significance of that is there’s more than enough business to go around, and there’s equally still lots of room for all of us to be friends and collaborate. We should count ourselves lucky that we’re in an industry that’s doing so well, growing so fast, and has such good quality people. It’s a great place to be.
